Challenge #01338-C243: Inconvenience Job

The dreaded 5 minute job. Almost always guaranteed to blossom into hours of frustration and searching for the 'right' tools. -- Knitnan

Time is money. Literally. Citizens of the Galactic Alliance pay for things in increments of time. And since the humans came along, some money has names.

For unknown reasons, five Minutes is a Zac. Ten Minutes is a Bob, and Thirty Minutes is known as the Five-Minute Job.

Human nicknames will forever confuse other cogniscents.

But not those cogniscents who have had to perform five minute jobs. They don't need to ask about it. They know.

They know exactly what it's like to be called to a short job, one that should, allegedly, only take five minutes. And it might have, should the caller in question detail what was wrong and whether or not it was intermittent.

What happens is a litany of errors. The flaw observed has nothing to do with the suspected device. The correct tools are not present. Once the correct tools are retrieved, there follows a laborious investigation that reveals that, despite evidence to the contrary, the suspected device is in perfect working order. This results in another trip for a completely different set of correct tools... and so on.

JOATs have become wise to the dreaded five-minute job, and when one is impending, they go and fetch their big toolkits. This inevitably leads to the problem being an incorrectly plugged-in plug. But they would much rather the problem be small, than massively inconvenient.

Nevertheless, the traditional reply to, "It'll only take five minutes," has become, "We both know it won't."